As I mentioned in my previous post, I seem to have managed to become enthusiastic about the web again. I’m still yet to figure what the gains are of even writing this blog, but whatever… I’m writing it.
In this post I’d like to outline some things that seem to have made web design (seem) easier than they (seemed) when I first tried getting into it all a few years back. One thing you should note is that I am not very well read about much to do with design, I know only what I know and I’m fully aware that I’m probably wrong about many things.
If you have read anything I’ve written on web design (which actually isn’t much at all), then you may have gathered that it really isn’t my strong point. Now that isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy seeing something I’ve made look beautiful, but I’m just not very capable at actually making that happen. However something that has really made me ‘happy’ about web design is how CSS has come along. Back in the day when I was shockingly bad at everything (which arguably I still am), one of my main enemies in design was the box concept. By this I mean where you would have some sort of content surrounded by a nice looking box. If I am correct at the time of my struggle the best way to do this was to create a background image for that division and work the paddings out. Now if you could imagine a 14 year old me attempting to do such a thing, then you are correct in thinking that I did an embarrassing job of it. Not only did I have no clue about paddings and margins, I had no clue on graphic design either. So what pleases me about CSS now is my lord and saviour ‘border-radius’, potentially one of the most valuable tags to an amateur web designer. I can be stubborn at times, so without some of CSS3 innovations I could well have been still running into that same brick wall today.
As someone who can struggle to take a lot in all at once, having a simplified version of a broader language is very useful. I am of course talking about jQuery, a wonderful library that takes the best of JavaScript and compacts into a nice little ribbon-wrapped present. Now on reflection I won’t lie, JavaScript basics are not as difficult as I perceived them to be when I was younger. However when I came back to it all a few years later I still carried the same misconception. I began to use jQuery and it proved to be very helpful and easy to weave into projects. What I really like about jQuery is the way it works with CSS. As I mentioned earlier design isn’t my forte, so any languages or libraries that can help me out are always gladly welcomed. As an amateur, one thing that pleases me about this library is how easily and gracefully you can show and hide divisions of HTML, such as the fade effects. I just think that they can give a great impression with very little coding.
If you have managed to read this whole post, then it may come across that maybe I am not the most capable person at web design and development and to be honest I don’t think I ever will be. I think that this may be one good reason to post to this blog, which is to document the ups and downs of things like this, to have a public record of it. Improvement doesn’t just happen and I want people to be able to see that.